International Studies in Philosophy 29: 1

RETHINKING LATINOAMERICANISM: ON THE (RE)ARTICULATIONS OF THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

JUAN POBLETE
In this essay I will offer-within what I have termed Latinoamericanism l_a personal reading of some essays by two leading Latinoamericanists, Alberto Moreiras and Mary Louise Pratt. First I should pause briefly to clarify from where I write. I write, or at least I think I do, out of a deep conviction that my field---comprised of Latinoamericanists in the United States, who, regardless of nationality, are working on a Latinoamerican literary object of study-is in the midst of a potentially total reconfiguration that is both institutional and epistemological. This critical moment has been prompted by multiple variables. One of the two overarching factors is the crisis of Literature as we have known it. John Guillory (1993) has built a powerful argument for the hypothesis that said crisis is that of literature as the cultural capital of the modern bourgeoisie. As a new technocratic or professional-managerial dominant class or group has risen, literature has lost its preeminence as the cultural component of that class's claims to privilege and power. According to Guillory, in the canon debate today, we are witnessing desperate and often ill-conceived attempts to rescue the traditional institution of literature from its possible transformations by the pressures of both the popular strata and the technocratic requirements of new forms of functional literacy. This poses achallenge to the literary component of the "Latinoamerican object of study." The crisis of Latinoamericanism has another general cause of which the crisis of literature is but a part. An easy name for what I am referring to is postmodernity. The increasing acceleration of the degree and rate of change at an unprecedented scale of means of transportation, communication, commerce and socio-cultural interaction generally, has meant, among other things the expansion of the present as a ruling category of life, and a certain compression of time and space that would somehow make it possible today to speak of a single global community participating now, in different ways, in a singular global culture. 2 This poses achallenge to the Latin American component of our object of study. For Latinoamericanism this has meant facing a difficult epistemological position. Originated in the United States as a form of orientalism-

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understanding what makes the other not me-the discipline has become a way of understanding (at least partially) the I. What is to be made of the fact that the D.S., with a population of some twenty five million Spanish speakers, is now the fifth Spanish speaking country in the world?3 How is Chicano studies to be related (if at all) with Latinoamericanism or Latin American Cultural Studies? The Other of the imperialist modern American enterprise has become part of the land has forced this American subject of knowledge to reflect on its own national micro reproduction of the First World/Third World divide. Thus, for my purposes here, what used to be a fully orientalist field today has the opportunity either to reconstitute itself along more democratic and less colonialist lines, or to continue business as usual under the masquerade of a professional refashioning. It is thus my contention that Latinoamericanism, as a field in crisis, forces us to confront some of the new ways in which the local and the global, objects and subjects of knowledge, disciplines and disciplinarization have been realigned by the epochal shift we call, for want of a better word, postmodernity. Now I would like to turn to a couple of examples of the paradoxical effect of the professionalization of Latin American Cultural Studies as illustrated by the work of Alberto Moreiras and Mary Louise Pratt, two of the rising and already shining stars on the discipline's firmament. 4 My goal is to show how the relationships between literary and cultural studies on the one hand, and the local and the global on the other, play themselves out in the highly productive work of these two writers. In an essay that serves as an afterword to a collection entitled Latin American ldentities and Constructions 0/ Difference, Alberto Moreiras gives us his take on the problem of identity or identity formulations. 5 The essay is divided in two parts. In the first part, he discusses and criticizes a number of the essays collected in the volume; in the second, he develops his own ideas via analysis of a story by Jorge Luis Borges. He opens his essay by recognizing his debt to, among others, George Yudice who, according to Moreiras, has overcome the problem of identity-a problem with a long intellectual history in Latin America. This history has endured long enough for one critic to have suggested that such a constant questioning of identity is, in its performative nature, itself Latin American identity. Yudice has overcome the identity problem by refusing to talk in terms of identity and instead speaks of democratization. Substituting democratization for identity Yudice, according to Moreiras, has gotten "to the bottom line, which is simply sociopolitical emancipation, and the ways of furthering it through work in the cultural sphere."6 Let us anticipate that an interesting blind spot in Moreiras's article is that nowhere else is he really able to reconnect with this opening declaration.

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In an excellent discussion of the various essays, Moreiras concludes that there are three distinguishable approaches at play here. which he calls modern, he considers to be exemplified by Fernando Ainsa and Enrique Dussel. It holds that there is a possible and desirable correspondence between a community and its being, and that until this moment of full correspondence, the community is lacking something that belongs to its real being. Another approach Moreiras (not surprisingly) calls postmodern, affirms that "identity can only be understood in the allegorical mode, which is to say that identity has no end as it continuously opens itself up to its own undoing and ... it only indicates the set of mechanism ... by which a given cultural community represents itself historically and politically." Identity here then has primarily no epistemological function "but an ethical function in the critical sense" (p. 223). A third approach, referred to as skeptical, focuses on disciplinary limitations of emancipatory discourses of identity, particularly in the field of History. Within this approach Pierre Beaucage's research is highlighted by Moreiras insofar as it "would seem to dismantle some of the political pretensions of collections such as this one" (Latin American Identityand Construction ofDifference, p. 226). According to Beaucage to be effective identity must be unconscious. What critical analysis does is to "void identity markers instead of giving them ground" by revealing them in their historically determined but ultimately arbitrary nature. "Although unconscious identity is still perceived by Beaucage as an important cultural marker, it can have no emancipatory value, because its virtue depends on uncritical preservation" (p. 226). Moreiras's own approach, or at least his sympathies, are exemplified by Jorge Luis Borges and his story "Tlon Uqbar Tertius." Borges inaugurates in this short story what I would call a postsymbolic approach to identity. What the story does according to Moreiras is to stage achallenge to the essential colonizing power: God (whose loss is of the second order) and the name of God (whose loss is the primary loss, part of the absence of substantivation that characterizes the conjectural ursprache or original language of Tlon). Let me offer a rather long quotation:
The loss of the common names of things in the babelic fall is the loss of symbolic capacity. Afterward, meaning and being no longer coincide. Post-babelic times are idiomatic times, which is to say asymbolic times ... The resistance to Tlon in the Borgesian writing, although it does allegorize the need for postcolonial resistance to the metropolitan symbolic, is primarily a resistance to any postulation in the symbolic order, including then, eminently, any postulation concerning cultural identity. This postsymbolic writing, because it would rather errlbrace the loss of the primary object, is a depressive, melancholy writing. The measure of its lucidity is given in the way it can maintain itself as writing. (pp. 232-33)

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Moreiras criticized Ainsa's article, an example of the modern strategy of identity, for offering literature as a solution to the antinomies of identity. For Ainsa narrative fiction is able to integrate without collapsing, (albeit in the form of tension) the antinomies that traverse the Latin American discourse of identity. In this way it offers the possibility of conciliation or synthesis. My point is that Moreiras's positing the postsymbolic writing of Borges as devoted to self mourning and self contemplation in "the joy of knowing itself faithful to itself, following its own law" (p. 234) is itself open to the same type of criticism. There is a modernist hubris in such an uncompromising joy; it evokes the joy of aesthetic autonomy. Both Moreiras's postsymbolic writing and Ainsa's aesthetical overcoming of antinomies are, although to different degrees, part of the same ideological frame that Angel Rama criticized as "la Ciudad Letrada."7 This ideology conceives writing exclusively from the point of view of the hombre de letras, the man of letters, the producer. What is missing from Moreiras's piece is the connection with Ylidice's substituting democratization for identity. How do you articulate such a position to the transformation of actually existing structures of power? Moreiras's attitude may be the rightone epistemologically, butit is certainly not enough to ground such a complex array of practices as Latinoamericanism. The way out of this impasse is to retain the new awareness that postmodernity provides in relation to the construction of identities and differences, and then to connect it with the transformation of current power relations at the level in which our specific activity is carried out. Or, to rephrase, the challenge is to be able to connect the resistance to Tlon in Borgesian writing as an allegory of "the need for postcolonial resistance to the metropolitan symbolic" with its decoding as "a resistance to any postulation in the symbolic order, including then, eminently, any postulation concerning cultural identity.'" This is the literary side of the challenge of Latinoamericanism as Cultural Studies. This means negotiating our intellectual positions not only to make room for such an epistemological awareness but also to use the latter to imagine new ways of context based articulations of the global-Iocal opposition into differential strategic identities. That in turn requires a different concept of the intellectual, one of a person no longer distinguished and burdened by the task of thinking and producing discourses in which that thinking is embodied, but who is rather a social actor carrying out a number of practices whose role is fundamental in the reproduction (and thus possible transformation) of society. This type of intellectual sees her/his role as one of the points of articulation of opposed and thus connected social discourses. She is not the unique warrior of thought but a person with a socially defined and historically determined role.

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Turning to my second example of the paradoxical effects of the professionalization of Latin American Cultural Studies, I would like to propose that such a concept of the intellectual-or more precisely, of the Latinoamericanist as intellectual-can be elaborated starting from the idea of the contact zone as it has been put forth and outlined by Mary Louise Pratt. In arecent article (1993), Pratt talks about the coincidence of the transnationalizacion of culture and "the dissolution of correspondence between culture and the national within the metropolitan nation-states."8 Her main goal is to decenter the fraternal and communal understanding that have prevailed in the discussion of nationalism. In what she calls "community models," social differentiation is always posited in terms of identity--even when resistance to hierarchies is being discussed. Basically she is saying that identity or homogeneity is a consequence of community thinking. A linguistic example of this would be the way in which certain types of social speech are studied as varieties of a singular monolithic language: English, low class English, middlebrow English, etc. Pratt's own proposition is to replace community analysis with one focused on the contact zone. That would mean
to focus on how social bonds operate across lines of difference.... Such an approach would consider how differences and hierarchies are produced in and through contact across such lines. Class, ethnic and gender differences would be analyzed not in terms of people's memberships in particular communities but in terms of the production and reproduction of those differences in the socially structured contact between groups bound together in their separateness. Such a "contact perspective" would assume the heterogeneity of a social group and would place in the foreground the relationality of meaning (p. 88).

In an interesting application of these ideas, Pratt studies the cases of some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers from Latin America. Her point is that by having been at least partially excluded from full participation in the fraternal community of the patriarchal nation, women in general (and these writers in particular) were able to criticize the nation's imagining of itself and in the process carve a place for themselves within such aspace. Their strategy was to present themselves as marginalized mediators whose authority was paradoxically predicated upon their position as inhabitants but not full citizens of the national space. They explored the borders of the nation as a fraternal community, creating "literary subjects located on the borders of nationalist ideologies, one foot in and one foot out" (p. 56). Pratt celebrates the position of these women on the borderlands of nationalist ideology, and calls them "cultural mediators." I hope it is apparent in what sense we could say that, among other things, Latinoamericanists are (or are structurally situated

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as) specific cultural mediators between specific aspects of Latin America and the United States. 9 In this sense it is important to retain Pratt's awareness of the differential character of social identities so that we can deconstruct both peripheral and metropolitan essentializing views of the I(s) and the Other(s). Nonetheless the question remains: where are we Latinoamericanists; or, where do we want to stand? And here it has to be said, against Pratt, that by unlimitedly criticizing the national as fraternal imagining we may weH end up having both our feet on a single world surface where the contact can be traced and analyzed but not acted upon. In such a scenario the community has not disappeared, but instead become global. The many forms of nationalism can be a weapon both for suppressing alternative community voices and for resisting the globalizing impulse of postmodern capitalism, depending on the context of their articulations. This is the global-political challenge of Latinoamericanism as a metropolitan paradigm, i.e., Cultural Studies. Thus Moreiras and Pratt have provided Latinoamericanism with useful research tools, which are nonetheless dependent for their actual value on the space of their applications, that is to say, on the specific articulations to which their usefulness can be effective. With these two examples Iwanted to illustrate the consequences of a specific academic and thus institutional practice such as Latinoamericanism while referring to the differential play of the global and the local within the context of both the homogenizing and the heterogenizing epistemological and political forces present in it. The preceding analysis forces us to face that Latinoamericanism as such cannot and should not strive to have a single function or objective. It cannot fully close upon itself because (fortunately) it contains the seeds of its own epistemological and political undoing. It is determined by the internalization of a historical configuration and practice which has included both a strong centripetal and homogenizing epistemological machine along with a centrifugal and heterogenizing political power. As such, any discipline-and Latinoamericanism to a special degreeshould participate in what Samuel Weber (1987) has called "ambivalent demarcation." It should always remember that its knowledge is made possible by what is at the same time a positive and a negative act, an illumination of something based on the (potentially) temporary exclusion of something else. One of the main dangers facing Latinoamericanism is the risk of becoming fuHy institutionalized without really reflecting on its epistemological, and thus political, claims. Again, "think globally, act locally" should mean always bearing in mind that what is locally effective and productive might not necessarily be so in a different context; what needs to be avoided is the professionalist paradigm of knowledge, with its

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concomitant claims of universal validity for its procedures and the knowledge thus produced. lO The professionalization of literary studies in general and of Latin American Studies in particular has brought a salutary replacement of the old sanitized close reading which remained indifferent to anything that was not textual in the most reductive sense. As a result of this trend, the curriculum and the canon in these disciplines have been expanded to make room for an increasing number of now theoretical canonical texts. Armed with these weapons the Latinoamericanist can proceed to undo or dismantle long-held readings of canonical literary texts to show their political biases or limitations. But this same liberating tendency has meant, for example, that nowadays American Latinoamericanists feelless and less compelled to learn and practice Spanish, not to mention Portuguese and other Latin American languages. Why should they do so, one could ask, if they are being forced to invest their time wisely in what will produce in the long run a better return in terms of cultural capita1. 11 Thus at the same time that we are all being sophisticated and multicultural in our analysis, we are closing down the borders by reducing our real chances of being awakened by "reallife" cultural differences. Latin America is thus so close, Latinoamericanists are so very much interested in it, that we can no longer see it beyond a few (now) canonical (formerly non-canonical) works. This often jargon-loaded theoreticallanguage goes to Latin America, where in many occasions it is happily consumed by the same elites that will use those concepts to neutralize genuine criticism from below by taking full advantage of their American sanctioned cultural capital. The same epistemological tools that allow the deconstruction of a homogenizing (both national and imperial) American identity, are used to undermine some of the most urgent claims of the subaltern for a political identity, access to consumption, and generally social demands. 12 Of course this is not necessarily the fault of D.S. based Latinomericanism, but it goes a long way toward establishing how theoretical tools and methods depend for their effectiveness on their institutional and generally social context-how, in other words, the play of the local and the global can fully rearticulate those elements into unexpected configurations. What is the meaning, or what are the consequences, of being institutional, of becoming institutionalized, and of shifting the attention towards the institution and the practices that are performed under its umbrella? One possible consequence is that the focus will be shifted from our discourse to the institution that informs our discourse, and shapes the questions and other practices we carry out at our institutional working sites. I could here mention one interesting example of my thesis: ludith Brett's article "The Bureaucratization ofWriting (Why so fewacademics

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are public intellectuals)."13 Brett's main points can be summarized as folIows: "There are two necessary characteristics of a public intellectual: that the person's work is engaged with substantive social questions; and that the person actively attempts to communicate with a public" (p. 513). From here she diagnoses that the main problems are what she calls the bureaucratization of life in academia (the institutional, formalized standards by which we are all judged) and the bureaucratization of knowledge (the disciplinary pressure for jargon, and disciplined subjects, method(s) and canonical texts). It is not simply a matter of reviewing our style (as Brett partially suggests, although that would certainly help), but most importantly of rethinking to what extent our practice itself as a whole is overdetermined by its institutionallocation. When Brett proposes that we rethink our style and our intended audience, I would reply that, as a starting point, what ought to be rethought is what we actually do, and the way in which we relate with our most immediate audience, i.e., our students. How do we escape a populism of the worst kind by simply rephrasing our discourse and redrawing our thematic agenda of interests? After all, as Pierre Bourdieu and John Guillory have clearly demonstrated and David Simpson has reminded us in his The Academic Postmodern and the Rule 0/Literature, it is by "creatively" adapting to new "social pressures" from outside while at the same time keeping the most essential authoritarian aspects of our practices, that a discipline (and us alongwith it) helps reproduce the status quo. What is needed is a rethinking of our practice as such. A different type of pedagogy that is always consciously trying to escape the authoritarian (populist or canonical) version of academic teaching cannot but have a deeply renovating and invigorating effect on the totality of our practice as social beings, and that certainly includes our discourse and the way we relate with our own and alternative audiences. It is then in our specific institutional sites where the most permanent, regular and influential part of our practice takes place. Therefore, it is at least misleading to ask "Why so few academics are public intellectuals," as Brett does, insofar it presupposes that there is a private realm of our practice whose effect would be limited to its restricted sphere of operation. In "What is Enlightenment?," Kant tried to posita similar separation between what he called a private (i.e., professional or bureaucratic) use of reason where one should obey the mandates of the sovereign state and king, and a public use of reason where one should be fully free to express his thoughts. 14 It could be said that in this regard we have not gone very far from where Kant left us: we do obey our disciplinary and institutional sovereign in our professional practice and then pretend to be free human beings when participating in a political rally. Social reproduction, I contend, rests, at least in part, precisely on such an imaginary distinction.

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This does not imply that we should not try to become involved in out-of-campus social work, but instead demonstrates that we always are. Latinoamericanism is then intrinsically defined by a constitutive contact zone element that prevents simple-minded separations of its epistemological and political components, in both the Latin American and metropolitan essentializing varieties. To acknowledge this relationality, though, should not lead us to forget that the theoretically unlimited play of differences is always historically restricted by the omnipresence of real inequalities both locally and globally speaking. 1 conclude this essay by clarifying my spelling of Latinoamericanism for those readers who thought it only another grammatical "idiosyncrasy" of my writing in the contact zone. 1 intend the 0 in LatinOamericanism to function as a defamiliarizing reminder of the conflictual and agonistic quality of Latin American Cultural Studies as a disciplinary field. That 0, not present in "Latin Americanism," is the exact homology of what is missing in "Latin Americanism" as compared to "latinOamericanismO," its Spanish and Portuguese translation. On the other hand that repeated o in "Latinoamericanismo" is the sign of a reassuring, taken for granted and/or never fully questioned repetition of identity of the Latin American object for some Latin Americans subjects. As such this 0 functions, 1 contend, as a marker of the conflictual and interrelated nature of difference and identity. It is a surface that both prevents the closing of any possible independent identity and makes possible its always provisional postulation. It is this defamiliarizing effect, within the context of American-based Latin American Studies, that 1 have sought to create by my coinage.

1 For my spelling of "Latinoamericanism" see my conclusion. 2 See Harvey (1989). 3 Beverley (1993) p. 16. 4 I would like to add that Moreiras is one of my intellectual mentors and that I admire his and Pratt's work. 5 Moreiras (1994) in Chanady (1994). 6 Moreiras (1994) p. 243, note 1. 7 Rama (1984). 8 Pratt (1993) p. 36. My emphasis. 9 There are many possihle historical factors for such a position. Among other things a massive migration of Latin American professors to the United States due in part to political conditions hut also and more permanently to structural constraints such as financial support, the existence of an alternative

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and available Latin American memory deposited in American libraries; and, in direct relation to the factors just mentioned, the already weIl developed legion of American scholars, etc. See the special issue of Latin American Literary Review (1992). 10 See Weber (1987) p. 147 and Guillory (1993). 11 For the notion of "cultural capital" see Bourdieu (1984). 12 A point forcefully made by George Yudice (1991) p. 105. 13 Brett (1992). 14 Kant (1963).

REFERENCES Bell, Steve, et. al., eds. Critical Theory, Cultural Politics and Latin American Narrative. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Beverley, John. ";,Posliteratura? Sujeto subalterno e impasse de las humanidades," Revista Casa de las Americas, enero-marzo, 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique 0/ the ludgment 0/ Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Brett, Judith. "The Bureaucratization of Writing (Why so few academics are public intellectuals)," Meanjin, 51, no. 3, 1992. Chanady, AmarylI, ed. Latin American Identity and Construction 0/ Dif/erence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital. Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press, 1993. Harvey, David. The Condition 0/ Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Kant, Immanuel. "What is Enlightenment" In On History. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963. Latin American Literary Review. Volume 20, Number 40, 1992. (A monographic issue on the future of Latin American Studies). Moreiras, Alberto. "Mterword. Pastiche, Identity, and Allegory of Allegory." In Latin American Identity and Construction 0/ Dif/erence, ed. Amaryll Chanady. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pratt, Mary Louise. "Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation." In Critical Theory, Cultural Politics and LatinAmerican Narrative, ed. Steve Bell et. al. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Rama, Angel. La Ciudad Letrada. Hanover, MD: Ediciones deI Norte, 1984. Simpson, David. The Academic Postmodern and the Rule 0/ Literature. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Yudice, George. "Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America," Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, numero 1 (1991). Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.